NAME

PortageXS - Portage abstraction layer for perl

VERSION

version 0.3.1

NAMING

For CPAN users, the name of this module is likely confusing, and annoying.

No prefix

Ideally, I'd have a proper prefix like Gentoo::, however, this is a dependency problem, and this package has lived for a while in the Gentoo ecosystem as this name, and changing a name will have limitations on adopting downstreams.

No XS

Though the name says XS in it, you'll see there is no XS anywhere in the tree. This, I imagine, is a result of naming crossover, and XS here means more Access or something.

As such, my preferred name would be Gentoo::Portage::API, or something like that, but we're stuck for now.

SIGNIFICANT CHANGES

0.3.0 Series

0.3.0

Slurping Overhaul

This module contains a lot of file slurping magic, in a few various forms, as well as path mangling and similar things.

This release is a huge overhaul of how that works, and sufficiently more dependence is now placed on Path::Tiny's head.

getFileContents is now deprecated, and will warn when called.

However, the nature of this change is likely introduce a few bugs in places I may not have transformed the code properly, which may not be immediately obvservable.

CHOPPING BLOCK

I've inherited this module from Gentoo Staff, who are now more-or-less retired, and this code has been bitrotting away for a year.

Its ugly, its crufty, and it has a lot of bad and evil things that need to die.

And much of it is on my mental chopping block.

Exporter based .... roles.

Yes. You read correctly. This code uses Exporter to implement mixin-style class-composition, like roles. Just it uses Exporter to do it instead of a more sane Role based tool.

This has the nasty side effect that everywhere you use PortageXS, you inadvertently inject a whole load of functions you don't want, and will never want, and couldn't use if you did want them, because they all require an invocant in $_[0]

Will be changed evenutally.

Poor encapsulation and many classes directly modifying hash keys.

All over the codebase there are weird tricks to make sure specific hash keys are present, and populate them lazily, and some tricks are implemented the same way a dozen times.

All direct hash manipulation is scheduled to be ripped out unceremoniously in a future release, in favour of more sane tools like Moo based accessors, lazy loading and things like that.

Poor concern seperation

Every module that has in it its own routine for loading files into strings, is reinventing a bad wheel.

This module is no exception.

I plan to remove 90% of the filesystem interaction in favour of using Path::Tinyeverywhere

Its 1 more dep, and a whole load of better, and much more throughrougly tested code.

So if you use PortageXS already, and you're using things of the above types, stop now.

PortageXS::Core::getFileContents <-- will be a deprecated function in a future release.

AUTHORS

Christian Hartmann <ian@gentoo.org>

Torsten Veller <tove@gentoo.org>

Kent Fredric <kentnl@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is Copyright (c) 2013 by Christian Hartmann.

This is free software, licensed under:

The GNU General Public License, Version 2, June 1991

Module Install Instructions

To install PortageXS, simply copy and paste either of the commands in to your terminal